https://www.barbarasostaita.com/photos-for-writing-section-1 daily 0.75 2024-03-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d65c87ad77ce90001f37157/1607957582251-X29ESBAFYXH0FM50ZARL/HealingAbolition_header.jpg photos for writing section https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d65c87ad77ce90001f37157/1607957582251-X29ESBAFYXH0FM50ZARL/HealingAbolition_header.jpg photos for writing section https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d65c87ad77ce90001f37157/1711780337185-ECMCV6ZMF4NJHCWO54NZ/image-asset.jpeg photos for writing section - “Sanctuary Everywhere is a subtle and insightful exploration of the sacred that moves discussions of ‘sanctuary’ toward new intellectual and physical spaces to reveal its unexpected fugitive dimension “Sanctuary Everywhere is a subtle and insightful exploration of the sacred that moves discussions of ‘sanctuary’ toward new intellectual and physical spaces to reveal its unexpected fugitive dimensions. An illuminating book not only for students of the immigration and sanctuary movements, but also for those pondering the meaning of the sacred in an unjust world.” — Mayra Rivera, author of Poetics of the Flesh https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d65c87ad77ce90001f37157/1711780290880-630FTIQ1UQEF113T4L7X/P1064736.jpg photos for writing section - “In this captivating and impactful book Barbara Andrea Sostaita conceptualizes the tradition of sanctuary in more expansive terms than usual. Suggesting that sanctuary is not a place but a fugitive pr “In this captivating and impactful book Barbara Andrea Sostaita conceptualizes the tradition of sanctuary in more expansive terms than usual. Suggesting that sanctuary is not a place but a fugitive practice, Sostaita invites readers to see sanctuary in spaces and practices far beyond those places that have long been designated as sanctuaries like houses of worship and into the lines of communication among detained migrants and the loving ritual of planting crosses where people perished. This singular book will make a splash!” — Karma R. Chávez, author of The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance https://www.barbarasostaita.com/about daily 1.0 2025-09-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d65c87ad77ce90001f37157/4ffc97a6-2eeb-4433-9a2d-d4c9868ad1a5/3238C6AE-08AA-49A8-86AF-DE77C4B94C0E.JPEG About I am a writer and scholar of migration and religion. I grew up in the US South, the daughter of a baker and evangelical minister, learning from a young age the importance of ritual and performance in the lives of migrants. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I teach courses on Latine religions and transnational migration. My book, Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert, documents moments of care and intimacy on the migrant trail, considering how people defend and shelter each other in the face of militarized enforcement. I am currently working on two books: The Sanctuary Reader is a collaboration with Lloyd Barba, and the first primary source reader documenting sanctuary movements from the 1980s to the present. Siempre Estoy Llegando is a collection of essays on my father's conversion to Christianity, his work ministering to migrants in the rural south, and my family’s complicated relationship with our homeland. My writing has appeared in The Nation, Bitch, Teen Vogue, and Remezcla, among others. https://www.barbarasostaita.com/scholarship-copy daily 0.75 2024-03-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d65c87ad77ce90001f37157/8b22b29e-6780-48ae-9c56-ab1a1c1feddd/Imaginary-Final-cover-web-01-scaled.jpeg Scholarship (Copy) - Escape-Bound: Juana Luz Tobar Ortega’s Fugitive Poetics in Southern Cultures Juana Luz Tobar Ortega was the first undocumented migrant in North Carolina to enter sanctuary following the election of Donald Trump. This article shows how Juana’s experience in sanctuary exists as what Katherine McKittrick calls a paradoxical space—representing both escape and confinement, possibility and imprisonment. Grounded in traditions of marronage and abolitionist flight in the South, the essay highlights how fugitives imagine ways out and through, beyond and above the present. Time and time again, Juana creates her own freedom. The Guatemalteca organizes alongside other migrants to escape incarceration. She creates art and grows a garden. She fosters friendships and builds community. While sanctuary is often traced to the southwest and North American activist’s efforts to defend border crossers, this piece repositions Juana at the center—showing how she both receives and subverts sanctuary, how she is offered and, in turn, offers “radical hospitality” to other migrants facing deportation. Read it here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d65c87ad77ce90001f37157/c67dfb07-deb1-44c5-8adb-d9d5b1973f20/9780815385998.jpeg Scholarship (Copy) - Borrando La Frontera: Ana Teresa Fernández’s Transborder Communion In Borrando La Frontera, a transborder communion performance, the artist Ana Teresa Fernández used powder blue paint to erase the US-Mexico border. This chapter considers the 2011 intervention and future iterations alongside a weekly border Eucharist organized by John Fanestil, suggesting that both yearn for a “lost intimacy” stolen by border walls and bars. While many scholars have recently turned their attention to devotional objects such as altars and prayer cards on the migrant trail, this chapter suggests that performance—its ephemerality and hapticality—opens up generative ways to think about the sacred and material religion. Fernández erased the border and, through the Eucharist, Fanestil transmutes the border. Their interventions suggest that religion is not only performed and material, but also imaginative and sensorial. Their religious practices dream of other worlds in the here and now. Read it here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d65c87ad77ce90001f37157/1b68fb1f-356a-4ac1-99e2-6629b4e5bfb5/am-rel-1-2-cover.png Scholarship (Copy) - Water, Not Walls: Towards a Religious Study of Life that Defies Borders in American Religion In July 2019, the United States Government tried Scott Warren on felony charges for “harboring illegal aliens” and “conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens.” No More Deaths, an abolitionist direct aid organization, insisted that the trial was a result of the government's criminalization of care. “Humanitarian Aid is Never a Crime,” they insisted. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tucson during the summer of 2019 to argue that the gallon-sized water bottles used by aid groups and the heavy-duty black water bottles carried by migrants can help scholars interrogate the boundaries of “America” and “religion.” Despite militarized walls and barriers, people touch and commune across the Americas. Water bottles are sacred objects—criminalized, policed, destroyed—precisely because of their potential to facilitate such transborder intimacies. Read it here.